Sherlock Holmes in Orbit

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “We must rally a force and be off for Euston Station!” he announced. “The kidnapped man proved to be none other than the president of the London and North Western Railway. His keys and security passwords are now in the possession of Professor Rosewame and his men, and in less than an hour a currency shipment from the Bank of England will arrive at Euston Station and be placed aboard a train bound for Liverpool. From there it is to be transferred to a ship bound for Dublin.”

  One of the Yard inspectors nodded. “Military payrolls for the troops stationed in Ireland.”

  ‘There is no time to waste, gentlemen!”

  With that, Holmes and I were off once more, accompanied by a sizable contingent of the Metropolitan Police. Past Trafalgar Square, we raced up Charing Cross Road in a variety of official conveyances, crossing Oxford Street and continuing up Tottenham Court Road. A turn right and then a turn left brought us to Euston Station.

  The train was already building a head of steam as we approached the platform. We could see the security men from the Bank of England approaching from the other side, carrying weighty valises and escorted by other members of the Metropolitan Police.

  Watching them, too, and waiting by the train’s open mail car were a half dozen railway security men. Some of them, in their ill-fitting uniforms, looked vaguely familiar. The Bank of England men had reached them and apparently exchanged passwords when the railway security men suddenly became aware of our approach. To a man, their faces blanched. They turned back to attempt concluding the exchange, reaching out to grasp the valises, but by now the bank agents were also aware of us and were resisting. A bizarre tug of war between the parties ensued, and then as we began to close in on them, the fake railway men broke and ran, leaving their prize behind in an effort to escape.

  “Catch them!” someone cried, and needless to say, outnumbered as they were, all six were captured in short order.

  Holmes surveyed the criminals, and all else he could see upon the platform, with an eagle eye. “Professor Rosewame is not here. I fear, Watson, that while we have thwarted his scheme, we have let slip the master villain “

  The passing of a week found us once more at Scotland Yard. Holmes felt duty bound to clear the innocent man who, arrested on the basis of Inspector Lestrade’s boot print evidence, seemed otherwise likely to be convicted of a robbery Eddie Mangles had committed. Holmes determined that it was, in fact, Mangles by the depth and stride of the impressions. Lestrade made a show of gratitude for this kind assistance, but I suspect his heart was not in it.

  “You have prevented a great wrong, Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade said through his forced smile. “What a pity Professor Rosewame and his miraculous equipment have eluded us.”

  ‘Through no fault of yours, I am sure,” said Sherlock Holmes with equal politeness. “Rosewame must have come back for something after Watson and I left and discovered our escape. Though he let some of his men continue with their plan, he and his other henchmen apparently dismantled the components of his device and drove them away. There were wagon tracks upon the floor of the warehouse when we returned from Euston Station. Only the steam pistons in the pit were left behind.”

  “At least we recovered the duplicate railway president unharmed,” Lestrade said. “Have you any news of his condition, Dr. Watson?”

  “He’s quite fit, really,” I told him. “He and his twin, as it were, have already arranged a schedule by which they alternate going to work and staying home. They seem quite pleased with it, actually.”

  Lestrade chuckled. “I wonder how his—their—missus feels about that.”

  “The jury is still out on that one,” said I.

  “But wait—” Lestrade suddenly interjected “What of your own duplicates. The twelve copies of you, Mr. Holmes?” “Interestingly enough,” Holmes replied, “in my great haste to apprehend Professor Rosewame, I neglected to finish the last step in the duplication procedure, the green ray which stabilizes the duplicate’s molecular structure. Without that step, each of my copies rapidly deteriorated within a few hours, leaving a dozen inexplicable and rather messy puddles scattered about London.”

  Lestrade rolled his eyes and sighed. “What a pity.”

  “Yes. Once more,” I proclaimed proudly (and with more than a little relief), “there is only one Sherlock Holmes!”

  ALIMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON by Lawrence Schimel

  The scene was unnervingly familiar as I called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes to wish him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in his purple dressing gown, his pipe rack within reach upon his right, and the morning papers in a crumpled pile upon the floor where he had dropped them after a thorough study. Save for the fact that it was the day after Christmas rather than the second day past, and that the hat under examination was a sharp looking top hat rather than a seedy and worn hard-felt type, I would have thought I had stepped back into the events which I chronicled in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”

  “And where, pray tell, is the goose?” I asked in a loud tone as I entered the room, hoping my attempt at humor might alleviate my uneasiness. “You have not, once again, eaten it before my arrival, I hope.”

  Holmes set the lens and hat upon a wooden chair beside the sofa and smiled at me warmly. “My dear fellow, it is rabbit this time, rather than the goose of the case you allude to. Mrs. Hudson is preparing it as we speak. Meanwhile, tell me what you can deduce from this.”

  He offered me his lens, and I took the hat from where it hung upon the back of chair. I recalled ail that Holmes had been able to deduce of Henry Baker’s identity and situation from that hat and tried my best to extrapolate similarly from the details I noticed upon the one I held. It was an ordinary, if rather large, top hat in all regards, save for a slip of paper tucked under the brim which declared: “IN THIS SIZE 10/6,” and a small stain where a splash of tea had fallen against it I pondered these facts, and at last declared, “He was not a very careful man, nor overly concerned with his appearance. He has bought himself a very fashionable hat, yet one which does not fit him properly and dips down over his eyes. Nor, having spilled tea upon his own hat, should he have then ventured forth unconcerned with such a prominent stain upon the velvet had he cared about the image he presented to the world. Unless, of course, there was an afternoon struggle which resulted in the stain, and in his haste to flee, the man simply donned his stained hat. Have we a crime to solve this time, or is this a whimsical inquiry?” I replaced the hat and lens upon the chair and waited for Holmes’s judgment of my surmises.

  “Very good, Watson. You are losing your timidity in drawing inferences. However, one can also tell that the man is short in stature, since the angle of the stain indicates that the hat was being worn at the time it was acquired, rather than lying besides him upon the table or a chair waiting to be spilled upon. Therefore, your conclusion that a struggle occurred is most probable. Only, the man did not retrieve his hat when he fled, since we have it before us. It was found in the residence of one Mr. Charles Dodgson, who is presently missing. Will you accompany me on a visit to his residence this afternoon?”

  I nodded my assent.

  “Good, then sit and share a bit of rabbit before we go. I hear Mrs. Hudson upon the stair.”

  “The police declared that insufficient time had passed to warrant an investigation,” Holmes informed me as we walked to Dodgson’s apartments, “but on the implorings of his landlady, Mrs. Bugle, and for the sake and safety of his young niece, Alice, who lived with him, I consented. I must confess, I was intrigued by the puzzle she presented: Though he had had no callers, she found the unusual hat, which you have already examined, in his study, a large crack in the looking glass, though she heard no sound of either a struggle or of glass breaking, and the white rabbit of which we partook just recently, lying on the floor of the study, its neck wrung.”

  We had arrived at Dodgson’s apartments, and I mulled the information Holmes had given me as Mrs. Bugle admitted us and led us up to
the study, where she introduced us to Dodgson’s niece, Alice. As is quite common for young girls, she had set up a tea party for some imaginary friends of hers, with whom she had been conversing as we entered. She stroked a large gray cat, who sat in her lap.

  “That’s a handsome watch you’ve got,” Holmes remarked to the girl. “Was it your uncle’s?”

  The girl pulled it out of her pocket to display. “My uncle’s? No, it belonged to the March Hare.”

  As if a premonition, my stomach began to growl at the mention of the rabbit, and I could not help wondering if we had just eaten the girl’s favorite pet.

  “You realize that it is set fifteen minutes ahead of the hour,” Holmes continued, while looking about the table where the tea service was set.

  “Yes,” the girl answered, “he was always late, and thus had set his watch ahead in an attempt to arrive at the proper time.”

  “Did the March Hare also wear this?” Holmes asked, showing her the hat Mrs. Bugle had brought to him.

  “Aha!” she said, when she saw it. “So that’s where his hat disappeared to. That belongs to the Mad Hatter. He’s been frantic over it since yesterday afternoon, when he left it here. It’s his only hat.”

  “He came to tea with you?”

  “It’s the only way to get him to come, you understand, and he had to come, so they could help me. They had to bring it with them.”

  “It?” asked Holmes, pointing to a little bottle that rested on the table. A paper label round its neck bore the words “DRINK ME” in large letters. The girl nodded.

  “And what would this do?” Holmes inquired.

  “It makes one smaller.”

  Holmes did not bat an eye at this outlandish remark. “Is there an antidote?”

  “There is,” the girl replied, and pointed to a cake in a glass box beneath the table. Bending closer to observe it further, I noticed it bore the words, “EAT ME” written upon it in currants.

  “I see,” said Holmes, who proceeded to dip his finger into the bottle and taste thereof. He shrunk noticeably, around two or three inches, and all his clothing accordingly.

  “Curiouser and curioser,” Holmes declared after the transformation had taken place. He looked thoughtful a moment, considering the finger he had just tasted, then continued, “It has a sort of mixed flavor of cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, and toffee.”

  “And also hot buttered toast.”

  “Yes,” Holmes agreed, “and also hot buttered toast. And why did the March Hare and the Mad Hatter need to bring it to you?”

  The girl looked between Holmes and myself, her lower lip trembling. Trustingly, she decided to place her confidence in Holmes. Looking back to him, she began, “At night he would climb into bed with me and touch me and—” She broke down into such a fit of crying that she was soon surrounded by a puddle of tears. I cannot explain it, since she must have cried more water than her body could possibly have contained to produce such a puddle. But Holmes and I both witnessed it.

  I wanted to reach out and comfort the child, but, especially in view of the circumstances for her tears, forbore. Holmes steered the discussion onto a different matter. “That’s a lovely cat you have.”

  “Dinah?” The girl blew her nose delicately on the sleeve of her dress and patted at her eyes to dry her tears. “Why, yes, she is. Such a capital one for catching mice, and oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!”

  “Or a man,” Holmes asked, “shrunk down to the size of a mouse?”

  Dinah gave a large smile, and slowly vanished, beginning with the end of her tail and ending with her grin, which remained some time after the rest of her had disappeared.

  Holmes took these unusual occurrences in much calmer stride than myself. “You might,” he even ventured to remark, when we were back at Baker Street, “write in your notes that he died of consumption, if you’re willing to interpret the term loosely.” He smiled, turned away from me, and began an alchemical distillation of the contents of that mysterious cake, in order to determine how much he should consume to return him to his proper height. I saw no evidence that his humor was an attempt to alleviate uneasiness, as my own earlier attempts had been. I was amazed at his lack of ponderings or attempts to explain the many inexplicable events we had witnessed that day. Justice had been done in the girl’s favor, he had declared, and was content, evidently, to let the case rest, solved if unexplainable.

  I shook my head and stared at his back a moment while he worked. “At this rate,” I mused as I began to prepare my notes, “he’ll have me believe in no less than six impossible things before breakfast!”

  THE FUTURE ENGINE by Byron Tetrick

  Although my reputation as the chronicler of Sherlock Holmes’s many adventures has brought me my own modest amount of fame, it has also carried a burdensome responsibility that becomes no less tedious with the passage of time. I speak not of the task of recording the minutiae of details in conversation and locale, the descriptive exposition, or of the underlying motivations of the crimes. No, if Sherlock Holmes has taught me anything, it is an appreciation of the trifles that make up the nature of our lives.

  Nor do I complain of the dangers that perpetually seem to stalk Sherlock and me, sometimes one step ahead or one behind, but all too often joining us in a military lockstep waiting for us to make a miscalculation. Actually, I relish that part—God forbid my dear wife should hear me say this. My fellow veterans of the Afghan War and those who have waged the farflung battles of our expanding British Empire know of what I speak.

  It is not even seeing the pale underbelly of the human race laid bare to me as, time after time, Sherlock Holmes has exposed the cruelty and greed that precipitates so many of the crimes he has investigated. As a doctor, I well know that the human condition contains good and evil, that the living body sustains the miracle and wonder of life even while cancers gnaw from within.

  No, my readers, the burden—and my agony—lies in the fact that I have not been completely forthright. Astute readers may recall that many years passed between the occurrence and the publication of the case of the Speckled Band—a delay necessitated by a promise of secrecy. Often I have made reference to other cases that, for one reason or another, were locked away. But always—call it a gentleman’s agreement—there was the understanding that eventually, as the circumstances warranted, all would be told. In fact, Sherlock Holmes has for some time, while not outright asking me to do so, made it known that he desired that I faithfully record our adventures. Certainly he did not invite me along to draw upon my powers of deductive reasoning!

  But here I sit, pen in hand, knowing that what I am going to write will never be seen by those who have so faithfully followed our adventures; that a case so startling and momentous in its consequences, and one in which, but for the skills of Sherlock Holmes, the future of the English people would have been disastrously affected, will be put away, and known but by the few of us who participated.

  Two seemingly unconnected conversations, coincidentally occurring on the eve of the beginning of the case, set the pattern that would later bear great influence on what was to follow. I had stopped at Baker Street to pick up Sherlock Holmes for dinner at Simpson’s, where Major-general Harold Thompson, who had been my commanding officer in Afghanistan, would be joining us. My wife had been feeling poorly as of late and was visiting family at the shore, leaving me to my practice by day and frequent dinners with my old friend at night. In his sitting room, Holmes had been in a rather foul mood and had not bothered to offer me a usual whiskey and soda. I shook off the chilly October drizzle from my topcoat, warming myself by the fire while I waited for him to dress himself in like manner for the relatively long ride to the Strand.

  “Watson,” said he, as we sat back in the cab of the landau, “I have long believed that Victorian England represents the culmination in achievement of the human race. As a people, we have tamed the continents, established go
od order under British laws, and begun the industrialization of the world. It would seem that all the pieces are in place, and we need only complete the proper organizing—which is what we English do best, I might add—and the British Empire should be on the cusp of a golden age.”

  “I quite agree,” I said, and tried to add a comment myself, but it fell on deaf ears as Holmes excitedly continued.

  ‘Then what is happening to our economy? I spent a good part of the afternoon with my banker, and all of my investments have declined, in some instances, drastically so.” And now, the cause of his ill humor immediately became evident as Holmes began a discourse on the pitiful state of the British economy: a deep depression in agricultural prices; trade associations cornering markets and manipulating prices; shortages of resources as pricing was assumed more and more by administrators and not the free market. Holmes had seemed to acquire more knowledge of economics in one afternoon than in all his previous years, for I have never known him to show much interest in money.

  “It is almost as if some malefactor is trying to ruin me financially,” he said, finally coming to a close.

  I laughed. “Come, come, Holmes, you can’t be serious. Manipulating markets of the empire just to ruin you? You give your enemies too much credit. My own small portfolio isn’t doing that well either.”

  “Have all of your investments declined?”

  “Of course not, not all,” I answered.

  “Mine have.”

  Simpson’s-in-the Strand has long been a favorite of ours, and the evening soon changed moods as quickly and graciously as a forgiving wife. Holmes and General Thompson hit it off quite well, finding innumerable common interests, not the least of which was swordsmanship. Holmes seemed to have forgotten about his finances. Dinner was a superb mixed grill of wild game, served with rice from the Far East, and more than a couple of bottles of Tokay.